Am I getting the most out of my CPU?

[WIntel]

Hi everyone, Now I don't know if this has been asked before, But I recently bought an Intel DH67CLB3 motherboard that is second gen obviously, Now the CPU I bought with it was a 3rd gen Core I5 Quad Core 3550 3.3 up to 3.7 GHZ, The dude in the shop told me this CPU would work with this board, Also Intel's website says I can run gen 3 CPU's fine with a bios update, Anyway I did that, everything works fine But I have a couple of questions:


1. Since this motherboard was initially for gen 2 CPUs, Am I currently getting the most out of my gen 3 CPU? As in performance and technology wise? Because personally I'm having doubts.

2. The motherboard manual says I can only run DDR3 RAM at 1033 or 1333 mhz, Yet I'm running it on 4 sticks of 1600 mhz RAM, and it is being read correctly and running at the right speeds, how is that possible?

3. This one may sound a bit stupid but The 4 cores and 4 threads of the CPU are read correctly in Windows, But why is it in the bios setup I'm only allowed to choose between 2 "Processor packages?" under the "Number of active cores" menu?

4. The CPU supports PCI-E 3.0, But the motherboard is PCI-E 2.0, So if I install a PCI-E 3.0 Graphics card for example, Would it run as 3.0 or 2.0?

I'd appreciate any helpful answers,

Thanks.

[Apoptosis]

1. for the most part you are just missing the new chipset features of say Intel Z77, but when it comes to raw compute performance there is very little difference.

2. Yes, you can run the memory higher than the suggested/supported speeds, so running 1600MHz is easily possible.

3. not sure on this one, but it's likely showing physical cores in one are and the HyperThreading ones in the other.

4. since the board is PCIe 2.0 you'll be limited to that no matter what discrete video card you put in that board. No big deal as you'll be hard pressed to find a scenario that really shows a difference between PCIe 2.0 and PCIe 3.0 even today.

[WIntel]

3. The Cpu doesn't support hyper threading as far as I know, Unless I'm wrong of course.

[Apoptosis]

3. The Cpu doesn't support hyper threading as far as I know, Unless I'm wrong of course.

Not sure then... Might just be something in the BIOS or the way it is worded. Your processor has 4 cores and 4 threads according to the Intel Arc, so if that is what Windows shows then you are fine.

http://ark.intel.com/products/65516/Int ... o-3_70-GHz